I’ve been trying to sleep for the last hour and a half. It’s about 3:30 in the morning. I fell asleep around 8:30 tonight, according to Esther. I don’t remember, precisely.
I got a letter from my grandmother today wondering if I was OK. She hasn’t heard from me in a while and she is concerned. I am going to call her in the morning and see if there is a good time for me to come by and visit her today. I really want to talk to her, to try to explain.
See, the truth is, that I’m sort of avoiding her, but not because of anything having to do with her personally. It’s because she is my dad’s mother and therefore seeing her brings up all the painful feelings associated with him. That’s why I fell asleep at 8:30 and why I can’t sleep now. It’s all because of him.
Losing my father has been harder on me than any other loss in my life, even the loss of Rhett. The very thought of it is so stressful that it causes digestive problems, sleep problems, headaches, nightmares, and of course, occasional bouts of anti-social anxiety and crippling depression. I really want to sit down with him, man to man, and tell him what he is doing to me, day in and day out, by cutting me off over a difference in religious belief, but there is little point. From his perspective, I’m the guilty one. I’m the one doing the cutting off. I didn’t just withdraw my membership in a religious organization, I withdrew my membership in my family and for that I can never be forgiven.
Which, frankly, is absurd. When my dad decided to leave the faith of his parents and join the Jehovah’s Witnesses, he was not withdrawing his membership in his family. He was not leaving his mother and father. Neither was I. I just couldn’t subscribe to lies and call them “The Truth”, teach them to others, and venerate them as the highest way of life for all mankind so I did the “noble” thing and was honest all around with everybody. Unlike me, unlike his parents and his brothers and sisters, unlike reasonable people everywhere, my father has adopted a belief system that has no leniency for deviation, no space in it for honest debate or disagreement. The Watchtower is right, everybody else in the world is wrong, and anybody who thinks otherwise is being misled by Satan.
Which brings me back to my grandma. I love my grandma and I have to admit, I don’t know her as well as I’d like to. Since we were Witnesses when I was growing up we didn’t visit for holidays or birthdays and so I missed out on a lot of the interactions I probably should have had. I always felt mildly estranged from the extended Sutter family, kept at a bit of a distance by the religion I was in. Now I want, badly, to be a member of the family, a fully committed, fully involved, member. I want to know my uncles and aunts and cousins better. I want to know my grandma better. But doing so feels like some sort of betrayal to my dad. They are his brothers and sisters and mother and nieces and nephews and he’s known them all longer and better than I ever have. When I spend time with them I feel uncomfortable, like I’m intruding on relationships that belonged to him first and where I’m sort of an interloper. I mean, if I am not fit to be a part of his life, why would I be fit to be a part of their lives? At least, from his perspective?
There is the additional feeling that every time I talk to a member of my dad’s immediate family that I am somehow bringing pain into the room. I am placing somebody else in the middle of a division between a father and a son that they can do nothing about. In a strange way it feels similar to spending time with my ex-wife’s family members. At one point we all treated each other like family. My ex’s mother is still my son’s grandmother, so in a way we still are family. But this divorce thing happened and there was a split and so now, spending time around Syd’s Harsha family members is awkward for me, it’s uncomfortable and it feels strange. Take that feeling and multiply it by 10 and you start to get into the range of how it feels for me to be around my dad’s family members. I know they are also MY family, but somehow that intellectual knowledge doesn’t do a whole lot to quiet the emotional response. Nothing does.
I see a therapist, I read, I do yoga, I meditate, I write, I spend time with friends, I talk to my wife, I hang with my son, I fish, I do yard work, I cook, I surf the web, I geocache, I play guitar, I drink (in moderation), I write software, I sleep, I eat, I earn a living, I pay my bills, and the cumulative effect of living my life in this productive and positive manner is that I am generally happy… until I think about him. That is when I wind up suffering through a long night of the soul like this one. That is when I know I’ll be watching the sun rise.
He’ll probably never know about this. He doesn’t read my blog, that I know of. He probably doesn’t read anything online. When my book is done, I doubt he’ll read that. He doesn’t talk to me. He doesn’t talk to me.
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